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Collaborative Insights

What we learned from our August 2020 convening

During our August 2020 gathering with systems change practitioners, we shared our success stories and reflected on the important lessons they revealed. We asked: What conditions made the systems change success you experienced possible?

During our August 2020 gathering with systems change practitioners, we shared our success stories and reflected on the important lessons they revealed. We asked: What conditions made the systems change success you experienced possible?

Practitioners shared skills and actions that lead to systems change:

SKILLS
- LISTENING to the needs identified by the community
- NAMING and MODELING the value of engagement
ACTIONS: 
- Addressing toxic white supremacist culture 
- Advocating for community to be involved early 
- Building on past work 
- Challenging assumptions + the status quo 
- Documentation so that "it lives"
- Finding a champion or using positional power 
- Finding allies and solidarity
- Risk taking
- Taking sustained and persistent action

Values, key elements, and the social-emotional state of our communities also impact our ability to be successful. 

VALUES
- Valuing people in the community as experts
- Bringing our whole selves
- Bringing compassion, empathy, intentionality, vulnerablity, authenticity, and gratitute for traumatic experiences
- Working beyond equity to anti-racist
- Open to behaving differenlty
- Not imposing dominant cultural norms
- Recognizing cultural and political change takes time 
- Commitment to systems change
ELEMENTS:
- Direct community engagement between those who hold power and those who they are indirectly serving
- Trusting relationships
- Connection with community to identify historical issues/traumas
Including perspectives and voices of those most impacted
- Compensating community members for their time 
- Constant feedback loops
- Planning and operations that honor cultural practices
SKILLS: - LISTENING to the needs identified by the community - NAMING and MODELING the value of engagement

Our collective stories also affirmed the critical importance of our values and how they shape our practices and approaches. Together we named the many barriers that we have had to overcome in our work, and identified themes across our stories of success.

Download the PDF of our August harvest here: